Calling Young Chefs!

Here's a fun way to stir up your child's interest in the kitchen: Introduce her to spatulatta.com, a cooking Web site for kids. Since its launch in 2006, the site has won multiple awards for excellence in food journalism, and it now boasts more than 25,000 page views a month. Spatulatta.com features the Gerasole sisters, Isabella, 15, and Olivia, 13, from Evanston, Illinois. They post a wide variety of cooking videos, from basic to more advanced, on a regular basis. In addition, they published their first cookbook, The Spatulatta Cookbook, in 2007 and have sold over 70,000 copies. Isabella and Olivia also travel the world giving cooking demos.

Most Popular

Cooking has always been a part of the girls' lives: Dad Vince is a food critic, and the whole family, including mom Heidi, spends a lot of time in their cheery kitchen (the videos are shot there). Even after working on the site for years, Isabella and Olivia aren't perfect chefs (think exploding corn fritters and melted ice cream), but that hasn't dimmed their enthusiasm. "I want other kids to see how fun cooking can be," says Olivia, "and to understand that food isn't this magical thing that just appears in front of you. You have to make it to eat it."